Dr. Andy Goldfinger: Quantum Theory and G-d

this is the year 5780 and it is tamuz and many of us are quarantined because of the coveted pandemic because this is being recorded um it's likely that some people will be watching this a number of years from now and we'll kind of know how the coveted pandemic panned out no pun intended and uh it's something that we don't know right now so we here in 2020 during the pandemic are living with a lot of uncertainty and just not knowing where things are going and it's interesting that that's sort of going to be the the theme the main theme of the talk that i'm going to give right now about quantum theory and how quantum theory and torah and god sort of come together um but before i i start i want to um start by doing a little experiment with you and i brought along a cup just a cup like many of you may have around the house an ordinary uh drinking cup as you can see um and uh what i'm going to do is take a coin in this case it is a united states quarter and i'm going to drop it into this ordinary cup and you won't be surprised to learn that that quarter is now inside the cup i'm going to take it and i'm going to place it over here on my extender and we'll just leave that there for there for a while as that experiment goes on what is quantum theory where does it come from when physicists began to look at very very small things in the world and by very small i mean um smaller than you will see through your ordinarily ordinary microscope that you would have in a college or in a in a high school biology class they discovered that they behaved in a very in a way very very different from from what we are used to in our ordinary lives um i have over here a pen um it's one of my favorite pens i buy pens by the pound from a surplus company and i never know what i'm going to get and this one says i don't know if you could see it the student organization for the advocacy of psychology have no idea why it says that but if i take this pen and i place it somewhere such as on my hands i have pretty pretty good confidence that a few seconds later it will be on my hands we are used to this sort of behavior of things in our macroscopic or large world and physicists discovered that when you get to very teeny things like electrons we talk a lot about electrons that they behave very very differently and in the 1920s a number of physicists with names of schrodinger heisenberg dirac uh paulie uh bohr one of my favorite physicist niels bohr um uh began to try to make some sense out of what was happening in this in this world this very small world and one of the places where they started was looking at light what is light now you are all seeing me by the light that is reflected from my face and going into the little camera on the top of my computer what is light um a little surprising that um light has been a metaphor for knowledge going back for for a very long time we talk about shedding light on the subject and we talk about the enlightenment and physicists have always been fascinated with light and wondering what it is now by the end of the 19th century it was well established that light was a wave much like the waves that undulate slowly on the surface of the ocean or that undulate rather roughly on the surface of the ocean and i was once in a ship in a hurricane on the ocean i can tell you it was not soft undulation but we have an idea for what waves are and how they behave okay and i made a little picture here that talks about one of the behaviors of waves and i wonder if you can see it here is a ship this is an actual photograph of a ship and from this direction ocean waves are coming and behind the ship here the waves sort of bend around it and that is a phenomenon called diffraction and that was discovered using light light is subject to diffraction and it is one of the proofs a real proof real proof that light consists of a wave then in the early um 20th century uh there were some very strange experiments that showed light had some other strange behaviors that we won't get into in too much detail tonight and there was a very bored young patent clerk in burns switzerland who came out with a way of explaining why the light was behaving in this very strange way and his name was albert einstein and for his explanation of this he won the nobel prize and he explained that light was behaving in that kind of strange way because it's not a wave it's a particle light is a bunch of particles so that the light that comes into my eye is a bunch of particles little particles which we now call photons and photons behave very differently than waves here i have an example of my attempt at drawing a ship and in this my attempt at drawing the ship we have some particles that are being shot at it and it blocks some of them and others get by but there are no particles occurring over here because the particles can't get through the ship and and we can see that phenomenon and particle phenomenon are very very different and the question is well what is light is it a wave or is it a particle and this really was very mystifying to physicists because they did experiments that proved conclusively that it was a wave and they did other experiments that proved conclusively that it is a particle well which is it and the answer seems to be both well just a minute both of them but they're contradictory you can't have something which is a wave be a particle you can't have something which is a particle be a wave it's got to be one way or the other uh why does it gotta be that way my brain in which i'm used to various things in my daily life in the world of large things like pens um convinces me that contradictory things cannot occur um this principle that something can have contradictory um properties was called the complementarity principle advanced by niels moore and his and his students and nowadays um it is firmly established that light is a wave and it is also a particle and if you don't like that well too bad that's just the way it is this was the beginning of quantum theory and it has been said that if you are not disturbed by quantum theory you do not understand it now from the point of view of jewish learning is there anything that we run into like this anyone who has studied the talmud uh you see that there are great scholars who disagree with each other in some very fundamental ways and how do we deal jewishly with these disagreements they can't both be right if they disagree in some fundamental ways so we have a principle a lover eluded this and this are the words of the living god contradictory things can both be true i don't like that most of you probably don't like that any physicists in the audience and i'm raise your hands you're a physicist well i don't see any hands so i guess there are none but even physicists are are are are disturbed by this but they have to get on with their life there was a famous physicist who said about the problems people have with quantum theory and one area in particular which we won't get into he said shut up and start calculating because when they do the calculations they all come out right uh next to happen in in physics was that there was a man named werner heisenberg and he was a german who was a student of niels bohr who was danish and he formulated something we call the heisenberg uncertainty principle and that gets back to what i started at the beginning of this talk that we live with uncertainty um his old joke is what is the heisenberg uncertainty principle the answer is i don't know it's not a very good joke but i'm a physicist and we've never been known for being socially adept heisenberg uncertainly uncertainty principle says a very simple thing if i have a particle um an electron i can know with as much accuracy as i want where it is i can know its position i can also know with as much precision or accuracy as i want what its velocity is but i can't know both of them at the same time if i know one precisely i can't know the other one and if i know this one i can't know that one precisely a little bit like light being a wave in a particle they don't sort of match and everything um now of course it gets a little more complicated than this i spoke about a particle with its velocity and its position it's also true of the energy of something and the time at which it happens if i know exactly when something happens i can't know its energy and that has an amazing implication which we'll get to a little bit later god willing there's the old joke that heisenberg was stopped by by a cop for speeding and and the police officer says do you know how fast you were going and heisenberg says no but i know where i am uh maybe it's funnier in german um this kind of uncertainty bothered many physicists that you can't know both the position and the velocity of a particle accurate at the same time now you can know something about the position and something about the velocity if i take this large object this pen and i throw it i can know its velocity with some degree of certainty and its position with some degree of certainty but as i get to know closer and closer where it is i lose my information in its velocity but because it's big and because the errors we're talking about are so small i don't perceive this in daily life unless i am a physicist and physicists we love this stuff now let's look at some of the uh consequences of this and they get to be even more amazing uh because of this um randomness uh i haven't spoken about randomness excuse me because of this uncertainty there is a randomness in in the universe since i can't know where something is and how fast it's going i can't predict where it's going to go perfectly and this is actually seen experimentally i take an electron gun which is a thing that shoots electrons and they really exist they really they really exist and i shoot an electron and i shoot it at a target i can't predict exactly where that electron is going to hit the target i can say it'll probably be here and it may be here with less probability so maybe i take my gank my gun and i aim it more precisely then my ability to prick where it goes gets worse the more closely i aim it the worse the accuracy of my shots we don't see this with a real rifle again because the things are too big it's really happening but the things that are happening are are so small and what came out of this is that um i can't predict what's going to happen in the world einstein did not like this he said i can't believe that god plays at dice now einstein also said another interesting thing he said he studied physics to learn how much freedom god had in creating the world what are the laws of physics that god had to work with all right uh from a total review point from our viewpoint god created the law's physics and i spoke once with a rather famous physicist i'm not at liberty to mention his name because it was a private conversation um and he who said he was an atheist and he could explain everything in the universe the origin of the universe everything to the laws of physics and then he sort of chuckled a little bit and said of course that raises the question of where the laws of physics come from and uh we both admitted that that was a flaw in his atheistic reasoning uh now from our viewpoint from the viewpoint of torah jews does it bother us that we can't predict what is going to happen does it bother us that i can set up conditions exactly the same way in two experiments and different things come out well to a physicist who believes the laws of physics are primary and that god is subject to the laws of physics as einstein apparently did that can't be god can't play a dice but to those of us who recognize that god is the master of the universe the fact that i can't predict what god will do doesn't bother me you know um let's take a little baby a little um i don't know 18 month old child and and she loves her mother and her father uh but she doesn't understand enough about the world to predict what's going to happen in the family tomorrow like um maybe it's gonna be a vacation so they'd pick her up and they'd put her in the car and drive her off on vacation and she had no way of knowing and predicting this is that disturbing to her no because the mother and father are so fur far much far advanced from her she doesn't feel disturbed she feels comforted um i saw something once where they were teaching um nurses something they called the helplessness gesture that if i said oh what am i going to do what is the gesture it's like what am i going to do you've seen people what can i do and where does this gesture come from what does it mean when a little child makes this gesture it means mommy daddy pick me up i will be comforted because you know more than i do you have more power than i do you can understand things that i can't but it doesn't bother me it comforts me and in the same way we physicists who try at least to lead torah lives are comforted by the fact that we live in a world where god is calling the shots because we don't really know how to do it so well and it doesn't bother us that what happens on the small scale is unpredictable completely unpredictable it's just the way it is just like the fact that light can't be both a wave and a particle and yet it is it's because well god made the world that way and that's the way it is you may not like it okay but you're not running the world all right you'd like it a different way if i were making the world maybe i'd make different things made the world a different way you know i would have certain things to be kosher maybe that aren't which you know lots of people eat these things and we're told we shouldn't say that we don't eat bacon because it doesn't taste good um we say that it's very good tasting but god said that we shouldn't eat it because we are to be holy in a way that are the people are not required to be okay a whole other subject to discuss now let's talk again about this ability to not predict where something is going to be and we get into something which is rather amazing rather amazing if i have a particle electron proton uh even even something such as a um i was using pens uh i have some i have some um lab equipment here jar mustard that's reasonably heavy and i put it somewhere okay if i know where it is and what its velocity is i can predict where it will be in the future but now since i have the uncertainty principle that i can't know both and again with this jar of mustard it looks like i know both because the effects are so small that i don't see them in my daily life okay if i know where it is i can't predict its velocity so i can't predict where it's going to be the next time i look at it i look at it and it's here well if its velocity is zero the next time i look at it oh i'm sorry i was below my screen i look at it and it's here if its velocity is zero the next time i look at it it will still be here but if i know it's here i don't know its velocity so the next time i look it could be here or here or here or here and the longer i let it go the further away it can be the next time i measure it again with the mustard it's really there it's just the effect is too small for me to to see and what we say is that the particle spreads out it was here and now it begins to spread out um physicists don't like having um things that they talk about qualitatively you know like it kind of spreads out it kind of moves smooshes this way it smushes that way they don't like that they like to have numbers for what they do because physics is is based upon experiment as a professor of mine tried to knock into my head that you don't think in a room and just think think think and come up with physics and you need to be able to make predictions numerical predictions and test them so the question is is there some way that um we could find an equation or a theory that explains exactly how the things spread out and the answer is yes we come to a man named irwin schroedinger who was a german and i forgot to say something so let me say it now the other person i mentioned who was a german physicist was werner heisenberg who came up the uncertainty principle that i can't know the position and the velocity simultaneously and i mentioned that verner heisenberg was a student of niels bohr who was danish niels bohr was a danish jew heisenberg was a german and before world war ii heisenberg was one of boer's students when the war came um the germans um took over denmark and um niels bohr was for a short time in copenhagen uh he was considered so valuable as a physicist that the british managed to smuggle him because he was jewish out of denmark and they did it by putting him in the bombay of a small bomber something called a mosquito bomber with an oxygen mask and he was regarded as so valuable he had a parachute too that the orders of the pilot of the little bomber were if you get attacked by german planes drop boar he has a parachute into the north sea and will come get him that's how valuable he was regarded and you smuggled out that way unfortunately his oxygen mask slipped and oxygen when he landed he was unconscious but he came out okay thank god now before the jewish boar was smuggled out of copenhagen his former student heisenberg went to see him and we don't know what happened at that meeting we do know that they got into a big argument and the argument was so intense that after heisenberg left they never spoke with each other again but what happened there we don't know there is a play called copenhagen about that meeting that was made into a movie called copenhagen about that meeting which is done in such a masterful way that you still don't know what happened heisenberg went back to germany where he was fairly well known and established nazi and he worked on what was going to be the german atomic bomb project and in doing the calculations of what you had to do to make an atomic bomb he made a a very big mistake and as a result of his mistake it looked like it was impractical or even impossible to make an atomic bomb it would have to be too big it would have to be too big because he made this mistake um to this day people wonder was it a real mistake that heisenberg made which indeed is what heisenberg said after the war when he survived the war um excuse me no no was it really a mistake this is not what heisenberg said i'm sorry i take it back was it really a mistake or did heisenberg deliberately falsify the calculation to show the bomb couldn't be made to sabotage the german atomic bomb project and that is what heisenberg said after the war so he claimed after the war that it was a deliberate mistake to sabotage their ability to make an atomic bomb and other people feel it was a legitimate mistake that heisenberg made we don't know what the truth is and i always find it ironic that in whether heisenberg was really working for the nazis or against the nazis to this day is uncertain and heisenberg was the one who formulated the uncertainty principle now let's get back to schrodinger schrodinger got interested in this question of i have an electron or a small particle and it begins to spread out uh can i explain quantitatively how much it spreads out so um the answer was yes and schrodinger came up with an equation to um enable us to do this computation okay and um it's kind of interesting what what this equation is called uh it's called schrodinger's equation and again since we determined that nobody held their hands up there are no physicists out there every physicist has heard of schrodinger's equation you hear about it in physics one or maybe physics two even though you don't see the equation but i'd like to show you what it's like um it's uh it's not a terribly complex equation now to those of you who are not physicists or mathematic mathematicians this might look like a terrible mess but in point of fact mathematics is a language just like other things are language and if someone um were to observe a person reading hebrew and they didn't know hebrew they would think how can this person possibly read this it looks like gobbledygook it looks like nothing but once you learn to read hebrew which by the way is not terribly hard uh i was part of a program where we taught people in five lessons and they're reading hebrew because it's phonetic it's actually much more easier to read hebrew than it is to read english um the mystery goes away so even though it looks like a terrible mess to people who've never been exposed to schrodinger's equation it's not that difficult an equation and anyone who would be a physicist who would see this would immediately say oh yeah shortening this equation now just as an aside in the 19 in the 20th century 1980s i believe it was i attended a very small conference at a s at an austrian chalet in a place called alpbach and uh it's in the alps and i was thinking to myself oh it's going to be so gorgeous seeing the snow and the alps and maybe i could even go skiing now i've only been skiing twice in my life and what i did i call skiing but a skier would not call what i did skiing they would call it falling okay but maybe i could try it again well that year the alps got no snow so we were up in this place alpbach in this little chalet and there's no snow for a whole week now the conference ended on friday afternoon in the winter and there was a bus going back to um i think it may have been innsbruck uh or another one of the austrian towns to take all the members of the conference back and they were going to fly wherever they want to go but on a friday afternoon i couldn't do that so i was going to stay in my little room in this little chalet prashavas and i had my um my usual traveling shabbos fair of grape juice and matzah and a very nice type of sausage called serve a lot that i like a lot and like the filter fish and my swiss fudge cookies that i really like and i'm getting ready for shabbos and you know i hear something going on outside my window people laughing and and yelling and laughing and i look out and what it is is the bus is there to take the people back to wherever they're going and it started to snow and they're having a snowball fight and they're having a great time before they get into their bus and i'm thinking to myself i drove up here and it's now snowing i don't know how long it's going to snow but i know that to drive back which i'm going to have to do um saturday night when it's dark i have to go over alpine roads that have like a cliff on the side of them with no railing all right and i'm gonna have to drive like this and it was pretty scary you know and indeed what happened was thank god i did it and i'm here uh but i did not drive very quickly that i will say it was not a very rapid way down those down those mountains and i was just afraid someone would get some austrian would get behind me who was used to that kind of driving and start harking honking honking but thank god no one did now why do i mention this because it was very boring the week in the chalet nothing to do and uh one day someone comes uh comes to us and says there's a little summit there's a church down down the lane he was walking down the little trail little road whatever you call it and there's a little church down there and there's a cemetery by the church and he says you gotta see this okay we followed him to the cemetery and this is what we saw this is a tomb stone okay and i don't know if you can read what it says over there but it says erwin schwerdinger schroedinger was buried there that was schrodinger's grave and on top of it it has a shorthand there's ways of writing equations sometimes in shorthand a shorthand version of schrodinger's equation is written above it so you can all see it over there that's the short shorthand version of it which he's he's so famous for and then we had a joke that we made when we saw him which i'll explain a little bit later so that is my contact the schrodinger now what does schrodinger's equation say it says everything in the universe spreads out excuse me i met abraca before i started talking so it's okay everything spreads out so if i have an electron over here i can't predict where it's going to be we say it spreads out that the electron ceases to have a definite position it shmushes or smears out and everything in the world smears out all right electrons do marbles do bagels do and my wife used to say that the consumption of bagels made me sort of spread out in certain ways but we won't get into that any further here everything spreads out now the next time i look for the electron i find it somewhere it's not spread out anymore i can't predict where it's going to be but when i look i find it somewhere then it starts spreading out again it starts spreading out again okay now the logic here is going to be a little difficult to follow so please try to put your thinking caps on and or your shake look as the case may be why do things spread out because schroedinger's equation says that everything in the universe spreads out and everything in the universe obeys the schrodinger equation everything in the universe in the physical universe everything obeys the schrodinger equation okay and says the things spread out when i observe the electron i find it at some particular place it's no longer spread out that cannot be explained by the schrodinger equation the schroder current equation which applies to everything in the physical universe says everything has to has to spread out when i look at is not spread out anymore now physicists have a term for this it is called the collapse of the wave function this is spreading out the kind of form that the spreading ache out takes is called the wave function let's not get into why it's called that it's like a wave a function means like um never mind in physics in mathematics a function is something which is like a curve as a function or a surface can be a function so it's called the wave function it spreads out this is called the collapse of the wave function when i observe it the wave function collapses to a particular point why does this happen well schroedinger's equation implies it can't happen but why does it happen we're getting rid we're getting a little used to the way things happen in quantum theory right now and you see why it said that if you're not disturbed you don't understand it it's because of what is called the classical observer now when physics physicists use the word classical they talk about classical physics they're talking about physics before quantum theory post-quantum theory is called quantum physics what was believed before then was called classical physics which is now known to be approximately correct but not really correct the classical observer can look at something and find out where it is in classical physics you can look at something and find out where it is because in classical physics you didn't have the jordan reflection so the act of observation by a person by an observer makes the wave function collapse to a point so i can see the electron there let's go through some of the logic everything in the physical universe is subject to the schrodinger equation schrodinger equation says that everything in the universe spreads out its wave function spreads out when i look at it as an observer a classical observer i see it in a given point the wave function collapses and it's there something has happened which cannot be explained by the schrodinger equation but extraordinary equation applies to everything in the physical universe uh what's going on here now according to the physicists in copenhagen with niels bohr they came up with something which is called the copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory and that is that the classical observer makes the wave function collapse because the classical observer is not subject to the schrodinger equation anything subject to the schrodinger equation can't make the wave function collapse you can't can't make it come to a point so the classical observer in other words me looking for the electron make something happen that can't be explained by the schrodinger equation but the schrodinger equation applies to everything in the physical universe that seems to imply that me myself and i the classical observer there's something in me that is not part of the physical universe that is the classical observer that when i observe it it is somewhere and my act of observation only by a conscious observer makes the universe function in a way that the laws of physics cannot explain so there's something in me that's not explainable by the laws of physics now physicists don't like this so they have come up with some other attempts at explanation um one of them is what they call the the infinite universes theory and that is the electron starts here and then i observe it here okay well at the time that i go to observe it all right uh my universe that i'm in all right over here in baltimore uh has the electron over here but the instant that i i look at it another universe comes into existence in which electrons over there and in that universe the electrons are there and another one it's over here so at each instant of time an infinite number of different universes are produced and the electron is a different place in each one but it's still in one spot and i interpret that as it's spreading out in my universe but not in the infinite ones and i can never observe these other infinite universes all right to some physicists i guess that's comforting we learned in high school about the scientific method where you have to do experiments for your hypothesis and do observations to test whether it's true or false the infinite universe's theory cannot be tested because there's no way we can observe these other universes and therefore it's not subject to test by the scientific method and i might dare say it is not scientific it is philosophical it is a way of getting away from something that disturbs us which is that i can't predict what the universe will do and that i the human being have something in me which is not part of the physical universe i have something which is not part of the physical universe now to those of us who attempt to learn torah we've heard of the nashoma the soul the shama is a little bit of a colloquial term because what we call them the shama has kabbalistically five different levels only one of which is called the shama so i'll say that's nashamah with the big nun with the little nun that's that's the whole kitten caboodle doesn't bother me that there's something in me that is not part of the physical universe because we believe that we have a physical side and um when the copenhagen interpretation comes along it's just well okay no big deal just like the randomness is no big deal if you are an atheist then it's a big deal uh if you're the type of person who denies there's a spiritual side to the universe then it is a it is a big deal now i said that most of the quantum effects that we're talking about are things that apply only to very small things turns out that there are some quantum effects that apply to larger things too that used to be that a person didn't encounter unless they were a scientist or a physicist and i'll mention some of those um radioactivity radioactivity consists of little particles coming out of the nucleus of an atom so let's take for an example o alpha particles alpha particles are a little helium nuclei two protons two neutrons and a heavier atom the nucleus suddenly this alpha particle may come out of the nucleus and zip out where i can detect it and that is radiation other types of common radiation are beta particles which are electrons and gamma rays which are photons particles of light but let's talk for a moment about alphas getting out of the out of the nucleus what keeps them in you know alpha particles are positively charged and the nucleus is all made out of protons all of which are positively charged and we know that positive like charges has repelled each other opposite charges attract like charges repel each other so the nucleus has all of these positive particles in it and they're all repelling each other what keeps them in the nucleus and the answer is there's a certain force uh this force is very strong the name for it in physics is the following okay the strong force okay uh in modern physics we know sort of uh i get this four forces gravity electromagnetic forces the strong force and the weak force but we're talking now about the strong force the strong force only acts at short ranges and at short ranges it is stronger than the force of the electrical repulsion of the protons so it holds the protons together when they get close together the strong force holds them together and even though they want to jump apart because they're all positively charged it holds them together and it creates what we call a potential barrier it creates a a a region in space that they don't have enough energy to go beyond that they can bounce around but they'll bounce off the walls and so on and so forth okay um it's almost like i took in my our experiment here a cup remember and in it it's a quarter sounds like it's still there why is the quarter still there because the quarter even though it's spreading out by a very very very teeny bit uh can't come out because of the wall of the cup but in the quantum world something which is com confined by what's called a potential barrier something it can't get over the the porter would have to get over the barrier to get out things that are kept in by barriers have a certain probability of getting out now we know they can't we know that they can't get through the barrier so how do they get to the barrier through the burial they do and the physicists call this tunneling almost like they tunnel through the barrier that's not what happens what happens has to do with schrodinger's equation the uncertainties a whole bunch of stuff etc etc and um beginning to beginning to get a familiar how these things bother you you're beginning to understand quantum theory more and more and more because you're getting more and more bothered because how does it get out of this now suppose instead of a quarter i had some liquid helium three helium is a gas and if it's liquefied it's really cold and if i were to take some some of this this liquid helium which i don't have and pour it into here so that it's level okay maybe the level was just up to there in the was just up to there in the cuff let's say and put it down that helium would come out of the cup because it would tunnel through and you can see this with this helium now each particular hedolium atom is is tunneling through but it's a big enough effect that with a macroscopic large amount of healing through you can see this take place you can see the tunneling and it's amazing it just comes out just comes out um you know uh we have a concept which is spoken of especially in many uh hasidic tales called that there were people who had the ability to live on higher levels than most of us um i was told by someone who had the um merit to speak with the satmar rebery rebuildish zafano lebracha and i was told that in person it didn't seem like he was in this world he was it was somewhere else uh there are people who live differently mike my review the boston or rebbe sometimes knew things about me that had happened and when he would see me sometime later he'd say this actually happened why were you so upset on such and such a day even though i was in a different city this is not what we call esp or mind reading or anything like that what it is is something else and what that is i don't know it's a sensitivity we have we don't have we i don't have and there's something called pizza saudera that there were people who seem to be able to come from here to here very quickly and one of the things that happens with what's called quantum tunneling that bothers physicists more than the tunneling itself is that when the particle tunnels from here to here it does it instantaneously and that's not allowed by the laws of physics goes faster than light things can't move faster than light how does it do that well i have no idea and physicists don't and similarly for those great great people who had clitzes anderach and can get from here to there in ways that i don't know what it is i don't know what that is either uh um there's a lot i don't know a lot i don't know and when you get to quantum mechanics there's more and more you don't know well schroedinger came up with a scenario for what the way that a quantum mechanical effect can affect a large object and he did this what's called a thought experiment he didn't really do this so don't get angry at me for quoting what schrodinger's experiment was but it's called schrodinger's cat and he says you have a box and you put a cat in it and in the box is the way he explained it you have a uh an atom radioactive that's radioactive and you have a detector that can detect whether it emits a particle it emits radiation and if it emits the particle then a a vial of poisonous gas is is broken in this box and it kills the cat now when the box is sealed and i have not observed it i don't know whether or not the atom decayed and the cat was killed now in classical physics i would just say i don't know whether it happened or not but when you get into the depths of quantum theory both of them actually happened just like the particle here spreads out to here and here and here and here maybe until i observe it then it goes to one place quantum mechanically the atom decays and doesn't decay that's the way its phenomenon is spreading out it decays and it doesn't decay until i open up the box and observe it and see whether the cat's alive or not before that the atom is both decayed and not decayed at the same time and therefore schroedinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time okay um sound crazy but it is a macroscopic a large ex a large effect a large phenomenon due to a quantum mechanical effect and there was a cartoon i saw that shows a man in a veterinarian's office and the technician is coming out and saying um dr schroedinger about your cat i have some good news and some bad news uh that's a physicist joke excuse me um so do we in daily life encounter any quantum mechanical effects that we can see that are really part of our lives yeah look at this watch okay now i i sent away for a catalog from a company called breitling and breitling sells very expensive mechanical watches and they're beautiful beautiful um and um they are i think in this catalog i got the cheapest one was like nine thousand dollars and they went up the hundred thousand dollars and they can go beyond and things like this and they're they're mechanical and they are absolutely works of genius in the way in which their movements work okay um and they're very very accurate for mechanical watches um this is a casio that cost me i think this is an expensive casio i think i paid 60 bucks because each night it receives the radio signals from the atomic clock in colorado and resets itself and i want the time to be always very accurate for two reasons one is i'm a physicist and the second is i'm a nerd but this watch is more accurate than any one of those breitlings that caught thousands of dollars and this thing was 60 bucks and you can get watches like this for 20 or 30 bucks that are more accurate than the breitling and i'm naive enough to feel that to me the purpose of a watch is to know what the time is i mean you know some people have other purposes how does this watch work it has in it a chip which has microscopic transistors on it um transistors were invented in the i want to say early 60s it may have been the late 50s at bell laboratories and you cannot understand how a transistor works without using quantum theory now for those of us who are older there were radios that had tubes in them and you could understand pretty well how a tube worked without having to think about quantum theory but you can't understand how a transistor works without quantum theory because it involves things like particles moving where they shouldn't be able to go um like tunneling like going through a barrier that it shouldn't be able to go through all these sort of things were used to invent this transistor called transistor was originally called a transfer resistor and was shortened to transistor so here's a nice good example of a practical device that i wear constantly and my life is really very dependent upon this you know if i uh the time that my watch broke i you know i had trouble keeping appointments things like that and it's due to quantum theory so even though quantum theory is something that we can't understand and we can't it doesn't bother me the fact is that light is a wave and it's also a particle the fact is that i can't know where a particle is and how fast it's going at the same time that's just the way it is the fact is i can't predict where it's going to go absolutely that's just the way it is these are the ways that god made the world god made the world so that when i a human being with consciousness observe something it makes something happen that cannot be explained by the laws of physics and therefore there's something in me which is different than the physical world we call it the shama it's part of the spiritual world and that is something which i hope that we will talk with a little bit more in the in the next lecture in conclusion i do want to say that i have found that over the years the more i learn about physics and i will also say biology also say biology the more consistency i see with what the torah tells us about the world hours of discussion can take place on this but especially in quantum theory i see a display of a torah viewpoint of us living in a world that we understand partially using it properly we make wonderful things such as this wristwatch used improperly it can be very destructive we don't understand quantum theory that's okay god has given us an instruction manual called the torah to tell us that even though we don't understand it we know how to use it for our benefits